Photography and The Private Library (Part II)

Anyone building a private library about the history of photography is going to have a lot of ground to cover. As we noted in yesterday's post, the principles that underlie photography were known as early as the 5th-4th centuries BCE.  The works of the Chinese philosopher Mozi, for example, mention the effect of inverted images naturally forming through pinholes, an effect also mentioned in the writings of the Greek philosopher Aristotle and the Greek mathematician Euclid, and the principle underlying the pinhole camera. 

This basic idea was expanded upon in the 10th century CE by the famed Arab polymath Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham (usually Latinized as Alhacen), known to medieval Europe as the Physicist and to the modern world as the Father of Optics (as well as the Father of the Modern Scientific Method, the Father of Experimental Physics and the Father of Experimental Psychology).  His seven volume Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics) is considered one of the most influential works on physics ever written, and in a related work he gives the first clear description and correct analysis of the functioning of a camera obscura. Published over the course of nearly a decade (1011-1021 CE), the Book of Optics was translated into Latin sometime in the late 12th-early 13th centuries and first achieved print in 1572 as Opticae thesaurus: Alhazeni Arabis libri septem, nuncprimum editi; Eiusdem liber De Crepusculis et nubium ascensionibus:

      

A few decades after al_Haytham, the Chinese polymath Shen Kuo established quantitative and geometrical attributes for the camera obscura, while also attributing the invention of movable type (porcelain) to Bi Sheng:

 

Among other early contributions to the history of photography were descriptions of the effect of sunlight and moonlight on silver nitrate (e.g., Albertus Magnus) and silver chloride (e.g., Pliny the Elder); Daniel Barbaro's 1568 description of a lens being used with a camera obscura; and Wilhelm Homberg's 1694 description of the photochemical effect:

But the greatest contributions were yet to come....